Yayoi Kusama's Tulipe I (2000) takes a single purple tulip and sets it against a deep black ground filled with a dense pattern of black leaf-like shapes outlined in white — the flower almost absorbed into the surface behind it, distinguishable through colour and the large black dots covering its petals. The tulip is rendered in deep purple-magenta, its head large and open, the petals covered in black dots that scale from small at the edges to larger marks toward the centre, a white line tracing the curved outline of the bloom and separating it from the black ground behind. The stem is green with a grid-like mark running along its length, the two broad leaves extending outward on either side in the same green, each one covered in a network of white lines that follows the veining of the leaf — the green leaves sitting against the black field and readable through colour, their surfaces carrying a different marking system from both the tulip above and the ground around them.

The black ground is covered in a pattern of pointed leaf shapes outlined in white — not the irregular polygon network of the Infinity Nets but a more specifically botanical form, the marks suggesting foliage pressing in around the stem from every side, the whole image given a quality of growth and density rather than the geometric abstraction of the pumpkin backgrounds. Around the outer edge, a red border carries yellow dots at regular intervals — the same framing device seen in the Hats and Shoes and early flower works, the margin as worked as the image it contains. The title is given in French — Tulipe rather than Tulip — a detail that places the work in dialogue with European botanical illustration and the Dutch tradition of flower painting, in which the tulip had been the most prized and most speculated-upon subject of all, the flower that drove an entire economy into collapse during the seventeenth-century Tulip Mania.

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